Manoharan named AAAS Fellow

Vinothan N. Manoharan, the Wagner Family Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor of Physics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 

Manoharan is among 443 members honored this year for their efforts to advance science or its applications. Manoharan was chosen for his “exceptional contributions to the field of condensed matter and biophysics, especially to elucidate how systems and materials organize themselves in three dimensions.”

Manoharan’s lab seeks to understand how complex systems, such as interacting nanoparticles or proteins, spontaneously order themselves — a process called self-assembly — in order to make useful materials and to gain a deeper understanding of the physics of assembly, organization, and life.

Manoharan is co-director of the Quantitative Biology Initiative at Harvard, as well as a member of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science & Technology.

Prior to his arrival at Harvard in 2005, Manoharan was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied the internal dynamics of foams. He received his B.S.E. from Princeton University in 1996 and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2004.